Quartetto III per archi

Jouni Kaipainen

Quartetto III per archi

Edition Wilhelm Hansen

Description

I have for a long time felt that string quartet is a species of composition very close to me. When I, as a teenager, wrote my first chamber compositions, they were nothing else but string quartets: the first, Op. 2, in 1973, and the second, Op. 5, a year later. A decade has passed, and I — funny enough — have in my opus catalogue come up to no. 25; so, the time had come to try to write a string quartet again; to explore how I, now, think about this widely exploited but quite difficult type of musical work.

I, naturally, could not use those 10-years-old quartets’ way of thinking as a basis. When one is young, an interval of ten years is very long, and as I looked at those old pieces I didn’t feel them to be mine at all. My relation to an ensemble consisting of four strings had to be thought anew. With this I do not by any means mean that I forced myself to do something totally different from anything ever heard. I only mean that I had to start from a zero point to figure out how a string quartet written by me would sound today.

As I have, during these years, composed lots of chamber music, no totally brand-new orientation was needed. In any case, the especially intimate nature of string quartet and the exceptional demands set up by the long tradition of the species make writing a string quartet complicated. I also believe that this is why string quartets are, on the average, more ‘serious’ works of art than compositions are in general.

My third string quartet is in four movements, as good habits demand. The relationship between the movements is, however, slightly different from classical models. The most noticeable deviation from tradition is perhaps the fact that, as also im my Trio I Op. 21 for clarinet, cello and piano from 1983, Quartetto III lacks the kind of movement that corresponds to the normal first movement, the one that in classical models almost always is in sonata form. Trio I began with a quickly sneaking presto. The first movement of the quartet is also very fast, but it is many times more dramatic than that of the Trio I, and the average level of its dynamics is enormously higher. One thing is clearly common: both prestos are music of a virtuoso character, based on the special nature of the instruments but still demanding much of the players.

Balancing the wildness of the first movement, the second one is slow and peaceful. Between it and the finale there is a more lively, lighter movement, which could even be described as a kind of an odd dance. The finale is slow, again, but it is heavier and perhaps also more angular than the second movement.